Archive for December, 2007
Effective Advertising
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/18/2007
Advertising has become so omnipresent on the web that 99% of it just gets ignored (did you notice the ads to the right of this post?). I could probably do an even longer rant about how I’d change Google Ads if I had the keys to the castle, but instead I’d like to mention an ad campaign that’s doing everything right. Read the rest of this entry »
To Roth or not to Roth?
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/13/2007
Even though there’s only two of us here at work (well, actually our first of two interns started yesterday… but they only work 20 hours a week), our acting CEO has asked if we want him to set up a 401k. I’d already gotten the ball rolling on a Roth IRA over at Zecco (paperwork filed at least), so unless he implements some sort of match program I guess I’ll just stick with that. In the meantime, I thought I’d give my first impressions of Zecco. Read the rest of this entry »
Piqqem in FlexApps on flickr
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/10/2007
A little while ago at work, we switched veins from “Totally Super Secret” to “Shhh, don’t tell too many people, but we’ll give out a few accounts.” The bosses didn’t want any press releases or newspaper articles just yet, but my co-worker and I spent a couple of days seeing if there were any slightly-stealthy ways to get some word out. I had stumbled across Ted Patrick’s FlexApps component a couple of months ago, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to test it out. There hadn’t been any new posts since April, so there was a chance that the group (even though it’s only run by one person) was defunct–but that didn’t deter me. I’d sort of forgotten all about it until this morning my boss sent us a link asking who’d submitted them (in a “good job” sort of way).
Compiling a Stock Flex Component.
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/09/2007
I work a lot with MXML, but even I still think there’s a little bit of chicanery going on when it comes to getting it to play nice with the other kids. Due to all the various problems that normal TextFields have with image support (via htmlText), at work I decided to replace the stock Rich Text Editor with a custom-built version that uses an estended TextArea instead of the stock TextArea. Because the extended TextArea is literally an extension of TextArea, I hoped I’d be able to just grab the source for the RTE, copy it into my source tree, fix the package, and swap out any references for the mx:TextArea with my own. So that’s what I did… only for some reason I decided to test this as a standalone instead of trying to immediately integrate it with our other code. The new RTE file compiled with no complaints, but whenever I ran it I wold get a Run Time Error (the OTHER RTE): Read the rest of this entry »
The $500/month Rule
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/04/2007
Growing up, I feel like my parents did at least an okay job of preparing me to manage my money (though they were certainly guilty of carrying credit card debt). Really all you need to know is “Spend less than you make.” One thing that they never told me about, though, is something I’ve dubbed the $500/month rule. Maybe it only applies to the first year of employment (I’m now just over 6 months in on my first year). Maybe I’m a fluke. Whatever the case may be, I always seem to have at least $500 of “one-time-only” expenses pop up every month. Read the rest of this entry »